How to signal smart card activity at the PC/SC level?

[Ludovic Rousseau]

Hello smart card and system experts,

Someone asked for an applet that would indicate if a card activity is
ongoing or not. The idea is to have the equivalent of a smart card
reader blinking LED but in a gnome applet. The idea is nice. Some of
my readers do not blink the LED when an APDU is exchanged so it is not
easy to know if something is happening. In general I look at the pcscd
debug logs but a Gnome applet would be nicer/more integrated.

My question is: what mechanism to use to convey the information?
I was thinking of using D-Bus and also provide other information like
reader insertion/removal, card insertion/removal. And then card
communication status.

Is D-Bus a good enough mechanism for that? Or should I use something else?
Any comment on this idea?

Bye,

--
 Dr. Ludovic Rousseau
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[Andreas Jellinghaus-2]

Am Mittwoch 26 August 2009 23:03:13 schrieb Ludovic Rousseau:
> My question is: what mechanism to use to convey the information?
> I was thinking of using D-Bus and also provide other information like
> reader insertion/removal, card insertion/removal. And then card
> communication status.
>
> Is D-Bus a good enough mechanism for that? Or should I use something else?
> Any comment on this idea?

I think D-Bus is the right base technology - seems to be used in many major
"camps" like kde and gnome and it has a small footprint, so other "camps"
can use it too without major problems.

But I have little clue if dbus is best used directly, or if you should
integrate with some dbus-using service like hal. ok, hal is now in maintenance
mode, but there are new daemons doing the same work (policy-kit, network
manager, etc.). not sure if any of those would be a good place to publish
your information, so client applications can retrieve it.

freedesktop.org has a general mailing list "xdg", it could be a good place
to ask for suggestions.

Regards, Andreas
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